The inanimate object Sam Worthington couldn’t stand working with: “This is ridiculous!”
One of the issues with being a mainstream movie actor in this day and age is the increasing need to be able to interact with, essentially, nothing at all, such has been the rise of green screens and CGI.
It requires a leap of faith to be Oscar-worthy when you’re reciting lines to a tennis ball on the end of a stick. But even that would have been an upgrade for Sam Worthington on one film.
The Avatar star was working on 2010’s remake of the action fantasy Clash of the Titans, a reboot of the 1981 original with a talent-packed cast including Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Mads Mikkelsen and Gemma Arterton, plus, much to Worthington’s chagrin, a little mechanical owl called Bubo.
While happily not on the annoyance scale of, say, a Jar Jar Binks, the golden owl was featured in the first iteration, and so they decided to bring it back 30 years later, a decision that didn’t go down too well with everyone. The director, Louis Leterrier, told Entertainment Weekly, “Sam couldn’t stand the owl. He wanted to destroy it. He kept threatening to drop it. He’d say, ‘This is ridiculous! This is a ridiculous thing to have in the movie! You’re going to ruin my career with that owl!'”
Bubo’s role in the 2010 swords and monsters movie, and the 2012 sequel, was at least reduced to a cameo, rather than all the beeps and whistles it made the first time around, but it was enough to get Worthington upset about it, to a degree that makes you think he may have a phobia of owls and/or mechanical objects.
Also, let’s be frank about this: Worthington made his name by starring in a movie that was almost entirely about ten-feet-tall blue-skinned sapient humanoids with dreadlocks living on a moon in Alpha Centauri, so you wouldn’t think he’d have his feathers ruffled too much by having to stand next to a pretend barn owl for a few minutes now and then.
It was all fine in the edit regardless, and it didn’t seem to do his career any harm, because Clash of the Titans brought in a mammoth $500million at the box office, leading to the aforementioned follow-up Wrath of the Titans two years later, which Worthington returned for, even though Bubo was back as well.
The Aussie actor is far from done with CGI though, he was in the third Avatar film, Fire and Ash at the end of last year and he’ll return for the fourth and fifth movies that nobody asked for but James Cameron is going to make anyway because he’s a billionaire and so can do whatever he wants, which is 1) repeatedly going to the Titanic wreck in a submarine and 2) making endless Avatar movies until people beg him to stop.
Worthington is also busy working on a few other new films, including one called Blood on the Promontory, which is a movie with The Boys’ Jack Quaid about five convicts shackled together trying to escape through some mountains after robbing a train, which unfortunately won’t do very well because absolutely nobody knows what a ‘promontory’ is.
I just Googled it, it’s a ‘raised, high point of rock that projects out into a body of water’ apparently, so there you go.
